from Walter Benjamin's ninth thesis from the essay "Theses on the Philosophy of History":
"A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress."
ok, this makes a lot of sense
ReplyDelete"A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread."
It does look like an angel backing up
with big eyes
yes
yes it does
Now, for the "angel of history"
can anyone say...
"whoa"
I get it....
ReplyDeletewe are a history of catastrophe
that is the perspective of the painting
that fits the description
we are looking directly at the angel being propelled away from us by the storm of paradise
we are the viewer
we are the pile of debris piling skyward
we are progress
this un-savable disaster